Jerome, A Poor Man eBook

“I fear you were not strong enough to venture
out in such heat, glad as I am to see you, dear.
Had you not better let ’Liza bring you a pillow,
and then you can lie down on the sofa and perhaps have
a little nap?”

“No, thank you, Aunt Camilla, I am not sleepy.
I am quite well. I am going to sit by the window
and read.”

With that Lucina rose, got a book bound in red and
gold from the stately mahogany table, and seated herself
by the one window whose shutters were not tightly
closed. It was a north window, and only one leaf
of the upper half of the shutter was open. The
aperture disclosed, instead of burning sky, a thick
screen of horse-chestnut boughs. The great fan-like
leaves almost touched the window-glass, and tinted
all the dim parallelogram of light.

Even Lucina’s golden head and fair face acquired
somewhat of this prevailing tone of green, being transposed
into another key of color. All her golden lights,
and her roses, were lost in a delicate green pallor,
which might have beseemed a sea-nymph. Her aunt,
sitting aloof in that same green shaft of day filtered
through horse-chestnut leaves, and also changed thereby,
kept glancing at her uneasily. She knew that
her brother and his wife had been anxious lately about
Lucina. She ventured a few more gently solicitous
remarks, which Lucina met sweetly, still with a little
impatience of weariness, scarcely lifting her face
from her book; then she ventured no more.

“The child does not like to have us so anxious
over her,” she thought, with that unfailing
courtesy and consideration which would spare others
though she torment herself thereby. She longed
exceedingly to offer Lucina a wineglass of a home-brewed
cordial, compounded from the rich juice of the blackberry,
the finest of French brandy, and sundry spices, which
was her panacea, but she abstained, lest it disturb
her. Miss Camilla set a greater value upon peace
of mind than upon aught else.

Lucina bent her face over her book, and turned the
leaves quickly, as if she were reading with absorption.
Presently Miss Camilla thought she looked better.
The soft lapping as of waves, of the Sabbath calm,
began again to oversteal her body and spirit.
Visions of her peaceful past seemed to confuse themselves
with the present. “You—­must stay
to tea, and—­not—­go home until—­after
sunset, when it is cooler,” she murmured, drowsily,
and with a dim conviction that this was a Sabbath
of long ago, that Lucina was a little girl in a short
frock and pantalettes; then in a few minutes her head
drooped limply towards her shoulder, and all her thoughts
relaxed into soft slumberous breaths.

When her aunt fell asleep, Lucina looked up, with
that quick, startled sense of loneliness which sometimes,
in such case, comes to a sensitive consciousness.
“Aunt Camilla is asleep,” she thought;
she turned to her book again. It was a copy of
Mrs. Hemans’s poems. Somehow the vivid
sentiment of the lines failed to please her, though
she, like her young lady friends, had heretofore loved
them well. Lucina read the first stanza of “The
warrior bowed his crested head” with no thrill
of her maiden breast; then she turned to “The
Bride of the Greek Isles,” and that was no better.